“Ask.com launches a new search site today which is more beautiful than it is functional. The slick new look offers dynamic suggestions as you type on the search box page. The results page includes different types of results in one shot, like Wikipedia items, images, videos and feeds. Rollover the video results to preview them on the spot, subscribe to feed results, or use the “narrow your search” suggestions on the left hand side to explore further. Overall Ask.com’s facelift is slick and impressive, but the results themselves still aren’t up to par with Google.”

Via Lifehacker

Liveandbeyond says:

Love the new interface and it is super quick. Kudos to the ask.com team for this excellent relaunch but as mentioned above, the results aren’t up to par with Google. So all the millions they spent on the ‘Algorithm…’ ads that we saw all across US and the UK, was it justified? It did get people to talk about it but there seems to be more work done on the looks and layout rather than the algorithm itself as I don’t really see much difference in that!

Oh, this new relaunched site cannot be seen by default if you are in the UK. You will have to go to Ask.com US.

I came across http://www.jakkass.com and saw that they offer free SMS text service. You can send free text messages to any number, anywhere!

At first I was a bit skeptical thinking it was a scam but I gave it a go and it works flawlessly! I don’t know how they can afford to keep up such a service but enjoy it while it lasts.

So if you can’t find your phone, or want to save money on the pay as you go… Use jakkass, it is simple, there is no sign-up required and it gets the work done.

I saw a a Popfly demo and am glad that Microsoft is making use of it’s new Silverlight platform really well.

Popfly, which is still in private beta is a new Silverlight application that allows you to build mashup and websites. It came late to the party as Yahoo Pipes already lets you build mash-ups but Popfly is a class apart. It has an easy to use UI and looks like a pleasure to create new mash-ups.

You can create apps that display your Windows Live Spaces or Flickr Photos on the fly and you can embed it anywhere. I really can’t explain it, Click on the link below and see it for yourself.

http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msdn/popfly/PopflyIn15.wmv

This week MSN teams launched http://liveearth.msn.com, the exclusive online destination for Live Earth: The Concert for a Climate in Crisis. Live Earth will culminate on 7/07/07 with a global concert on seven continents with venues that include the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia, and Turkey. Live Earth is much more than a concert – it’s designed to be a catalyst event to coalesce a worldwide community of people who share a single environmental vision and mission: to convert concern to action.

More than 150 of the world’s hottest artists will perform for Live Earth including Madonna, whose new song, “Hey You” is available for free download exclusively for seven days from the MSN Live Earth site.

“Hey You” was produced by Pharrell Williams and Madonna and recorded in London. Madonna will perform “Hey You” as one of the headliners for Live Earth U.K., joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, the Beastie Boys and other performers at Wembley Stadium in London on July 7, as part of the 24-hour, seven-continent Live Earth concert series.

As the exclusive online destination for Live Earth, MSN is pleased to offer this song in conjunction with Madonna and is proud to donate 25 cents for each of the first 1 million downloads to the Alliance for Climate Protection, in support of Live Earth.

spaces maps plots your blog’s visitors on a map. This is for Windows Live Spaces only as the map is added via a gadget and it also uses Windows Live Local / Virtual earth map, where your visitors are plotted as push-pins and you can zoom in/out.

With no code pasting required, you can get a map on your Space in a couple of minutes. This is still in beta and be prepared to see a lot of changes to it. Give spaces maps a try and any feedback is welcome…

Cutting down time on the ransom notes

Ransom Note Generator via Lifehacker

p.s. Doesn’t seem to generate the most important symbol ,’$’. Dammit!!

Is email too boring and blogging too tedious?

Bring in Zimoz. A start-up that is based in San Carlos, CA. USA and Mumbai, India that lets you share rich content with your friends on the fly!

Wait isn’t that what blogs are supposed to be for?

Yes, blogs do allow you to share content with your friends and so does email, but not everyone has the time to maintain blogs and emails are not rich enough. Zimoz is going for a niche market where users who want to share rich content with their friends with minimal time and effort needed to create it.

Why Zimoz?

Apparently they were not happy with a previous name that they had picked so they decided that their pet frogs name Zimoz will do just fine. Interesting name that…

Okay, now to the website and the service itself:

The website is easy on the eyes and is nicely designed. The sign up process is relatively straight forward and is simple to go through, yet the activation email takes ages to get sent through and thus hinders your setup experience. I guess this is to prevent bot accounts, But everything from this point is brilliant – the graphics, the website layout, the fresh and clean interface. Moving on…The whole website seems to run in AJAX, a smooth asynchronies website which loads things quickly and without hassle. Everything loads effortlessly, everything seems to work seamlessly with everything else – it’s a pleasure to navigate through. There are little things you have to keep your eye out for such as the little bits of humour and bits which really add to the experience. Creating the actual postcard itself is easy to use, swish, and has a whole load of tools with drag and drop funtionality work brilliantly. You can add a variety of media such as pictures, text, a banner or clip art, even video to your postcard; my friends are away in Quebec at the moment and they’ve sent me a beautiful video of them around the city, and this really adds to the experience of postcards.

You can do pretty much anything in your postcard – it’s so dynamic and easy to use, even the most novice of users could use it with little or no problem. It’s fair to say this website hasn’t been completely polished off – with a few links here and there which look a bit out of place, and a mixture of rich-text and HTML style text, but that’s only a small amount of the whole experience. You can save, share, delete and publish your postcards, and being careful of kids as well, you can also view and report abuse on other people’s postcards if they are not of a fitting nature to people.

There is a social networking element added. Profile creation is easy on the Zimoz home page, latest public and feaured postcards are displayed. Popular and new members are shown too. The postcards are tagged so you can browse them via tags as well. You can explore new postcards and also comment on them, Comments are in the form of spots. You can leave spots anywhere on the postcard with emotional icons. They can be hidden. You can also reply to postcards with a ‘Add to Trail’ function.

So that is Zimoz for you, a new way of creating you own content on the fly and sending it to your friends easily or sharing it with friends made though Zimoz, oh wait are they called Zimozians?

Zimoz opened in beta around Mid-Feb and currently have 50 - 70K+ views/ month.

Check out our postcard!!

Zimoz - Blogging in Postcards

KissyouTube allows you to enter YouTube video URL’s and it will give generate a download link for you to download the selected video in a .flv format. Or you can just add kiss in front of a YouTube URL.

For e.g: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iw1uEVaQpA becomes http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=2Iw1uEVaQpA

I don’t really download YouTube videos but this maybe useful to a few YouTube addicts. Nice to see how people come up with ways to create stuff around YouTube and MySpace Social Networking sites.

“Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen”

Via Twingly [download]

MyToons, which is currently in private beta, is an impressive new video and image-sharing site for cartoons. You can upload your own videos and artwork, and find the most viewed, top rated, most discussed and most recent media in these sections.